Hummingbird Salamander(65)

My fingers were like creatures in search of a piano, but maybe the better lie was that they could never stop trying to work, as if they felt the rest of me would stop functioning otherwise. And, somehow, they were connected to the condition of my left leg. The more my fingers wandered, the more the leg hurt.

I never drink (except I do). I don’t like bars (except I do). I just needed to be someone else for a while (except I need to be someone else all the time). Besides, you might overhear something useful in a bar. You might even get to show the bartender an ancient photo of an Argentine woman or a more recent one—a newspaper clipping with a group shot that had “R.S.” in it.

Seen this one? How about this one? Nope. No. Never. Mostly I showed Silvina’s photo to old people who said they’d never lived anywhere else. Vain hope. But it passed the time.

Alcohol was my only available health care. Mixed with a furtive duck into a clinic, if it was far enough out in the sticks.

Always, every moment, I kept wondering about Silvina, even as I hated her for what she’d let happen to me, or done to me … if Silvina would know what to do next. If Silvina would’ve been better at putting the pieces back together.

Some bars, I’ve found, people rarely leave you alone for long. Under the squint and crinkle and shadowy rubble of bad lights, a shadow approached me, like a swaying statue, as I downed another shot.

“You look like you—”

I reached out and, swiveling on the stool, pulled him close by his jacket. I punched him hard in the stomach with my other hand, closed in a fist. I felt my knuckles hard and already raw against the flab of his paunch and punched him again. Gasped at the flash of agony running up my leg from putting all my weight on it. Stupid. Forgetful.

Then I released him, as the putrid expulsion of his breath washed over me, and he was rolling there on the floor, along with the barstool he’d taken with him. Entangled with some short mop or other cleaning implement that’d been leaning against the bar. Almost like there was an undertow.

“Why’d you do that, woman?” he whined. “Why?”

Maybe because I was weary of being called “woman.” Or weary of being talked to while I drank or because my fingers needed something to distract them. Maybe because I was a mean person or because channeling Shot was, irony, self-preservation in these post-balcony times. Not getting to the gym wasn’t great for my mood, either.

I grabbed my cane from the hook, brandished it as I brought my stool to the far corner of the bar, so I could see everyone and everything, including the bathrooms and the front door.

The bartender was a bright owl staring at me motionless. He looked like he’d seen something new after a month of only the usual. I guess he expected me to leave, but the “bar” was hardly a business and at the end of a dirt road in a forest of strange, gnarled trees with a milky-looking bog beyond. I didn’t think the place had a license, and I had more than just one gun on me, actually. Along with two knives, one in an ankle sheath and one stuck in my money belt, under my dull-red lumberjack shirt. I’d left most of my weapons back at the houseboat.

I asked for another shot. He poured it, and the man on the floor receded, maybe said something more or maybe he didn’t. But I still didn’t care, and maybe the three men in the corner playing a clumsy game of cutthroat pool snickered at him or maybe they didn’t. Main thing was, they didn’t come near me the whole rest of the night.



* * *



In the car later, under a contaminated gray-green sky, my back ached, but my shoulders were worse: that brittle shooting stab that, like random veins of lightning, wandered places unexpected and new each time. Sitting was worse than standing for my leg, something wrong with the nerves, like someone had run an iron rod through it, but leg pain I was more familiar with by then.

You never know every part of yourself because you never encounter yourself in all situations. But I’d come closer. I was a wounded beast. A creature that hurt all over. The pain cascaded, reached crescendo, lowered to a murderous hum and shudder, but never left. I could not contain it and had to live within it. I saw through it, worked through it, because I had to, because I thought I still had a purpose.

Maybe I could blame the pain for how I was a different person since the warehouse, since the balcony. Maybe not. But I wanted to kill someone. Anyone who came across my path and looked at me the wrong way.

Back in the old days, they claimed salamanders were born in fire, born to fire. That if you touched one, you, too, would be consumed by flames. But unlike the salamander, you wouldn’t survive the encounter. That a poison lived in the conflagration.

I was so much on fire all the time, I should’ve died.





[69]


Even in pain, even in a kind of limbo, I knew what felt right. I knew I felt right. More myself, even if I couldn’t define “my self.” Why should I be more comfortable in grubby diners or bars in the middle of nowhere? Did it seem more authentic than my life before?

No, it was more that all the things I thought I’d enjoyed … I hadn’t. Not really. Stripped down, I saw I’d enjoyed almost nothing and, in the end, needed so much less than I’d had. How the idea of “husband” faded, even if the idea of “daughter” didn’t. How I couldn’t tell if that was due to different kinds of guilt or just a frank admission. I wasn’t a dandelion. He wasn’t a bear. We just called each other those things in hopes the sentiment was true.